Martha Rhodes is the author of At the Gate and Perfect Disappearance, winner of the 2000 Green Rose Prize. She is the Director and one of the founding editors of Four Way Books, an independent literary press. Agni, American Poetry Review, Columbia, Harvard Review, The Marlboro Review, and Ploughshares have published her work. Rhodes teaches writing at New School University and Emerson College, and is a Visiting Professor (Winter 2001) at the University of California at Irvine's MFA Program. She lives in New York City.

The poems on this page appear in Perfect Disappearance. They are reprinted here with the permission of New Issues Poetry & Prose.

Four Poems by Martha Rhodes

Our father at 80 has moved to the country where

he's no longer poisoned
every Sabbath dinner by his imagined sons
owing him money (his one real son
birthed into a receptacle somewhere & all this revealed one night
when our father was far past drunk
transported elsewhere, shameful
untraceable, not-of-our-mother boychik,
our brother).
Our father, splitting up wood,
dips his cut finger
into a canteen of bourbon

recalling to us his pal Sharkey's cure
for their frequent bouts of clap
(soak the damn thing in scotch)
and recalls Sharkey hobbling down grandpa's
pawn shop aisles, futzing with watches,
pocketing rings, father in too much pain
to chase him. And always,
by the seventh day of treatment
they were running with the girls again.
My sisters and I won't stay for dinner,
(squirrels steeping in wine).

Oh, Luminous

Yesterday, another dog collapsed, this one
endlessly carrying slippers and bones.

If I don't leave here now, I'll die here,
the ascent to town less than one hour

The owner is lost. The house has lost
the owner, the owner has lost the house.

Where there are no chairs
there are plates and silver

scattered across the lawnsunless,
seedless, wormless lawn

even the dead and the ones
underneath the dead

crawl away, away, deeper down,
do I still have time?

Oh luminous town.

It being forbidden

to excuse oneself from table
before each morsel is chewed and swallowed;
it being forbidden to laugh
unless he conducts, pitch and duration,
his arms raised, our sisterly heads shamed
downward; it being forbidden
to invite another to that table who dares
to be more handsome and charming than he.

It being commanded to worship
that occupier of the armed-chair,
carver of pheasants, rabbinic imposter,
tweed-suited weekend gardener,
peddler of diamonds to the ghetto

and we do worship him
for plentiful is his table,
joyous the summer camps,
vast the Canadian forests,
the Caribbean Sea.

He who orchestrates with knife and fork
pulls us to our knees
and we pray with him who whispersdo you love me
and we cry with him who whimpersno one loves me
and we kiss him on his templeno one touches me
and we remain in his house
longer than we ought, for he prophesieseven you shall leave me
and when we do leave him, as we must,
we transplant lilacs and peonies from his garden
to ours so that he shall bloom
beneath our windows.

Elegy

My body given away, parts
flown to other partsa child
receives my eyes, another
my heart, the diseased organs
remain, benign now.
In death I am waiting
for my soul to arrive
that I may divide it equally
among frightened neighbors.
In death I pursue a man
younger than my father
ever was in my life.
In death I am a mother
who disowns her children
in a market parking lot.
In death a ghost lies
under me, pregnant. In death
I unbury myself and try
to extract my soul surgically;
it will not release, will not;
I discover there is no one else
this soul wishes to be.